Abbott's asylum plan at odds with ADF purpose

Under Abbott's plan the ADF would have a bigger role to play than is presently the case in 'deterring' people smugglers.

Submitted: Lyn Sinclair

The Australian Defence Force holds a unique position in society. Tony Abbott's asylum seeker proposal attacks the fundamental ethos of the profession of arms, writes Alan Stephens.

Apparently spooked by Kevin Rudd's plan to send boat people to Papua New Guinea, Tony Abbott has come up with an equally crass proposal.

Under the Coalition's 'Operation Sovereign Borders', a three-star military officer appointed by the chief of the Defence Force would command Australia's so-called border protection campaign, in an attempt to control a situation described by Abbott as 'a national emergency'.

Other parts of his proposal make it certain that the ADF would have a bigger role to play than is presently the case in 'deterring' people smugglers and their desperate human cargo.

Disingenuous pronouncements from Abbott, shadow immigration minister Scott Morrison, and their plan's architect, retired general Jim Molan, that this would be an appropriate use of the ADF have been rejected by defence experts.

The media release from the respected chief of the Defence Force, General David Hurley, while (properly) not overtly criticising the plan, had a decidedly cool, even icy, undertone. The Australia Defence Association's Neil James condemned the policy for militarising 'what remains unequivocally a civil law enforcement issue'. Retired CDF Admiral Chris Barrie was unimpressed. Their common, unspoken concern was about the ethics of military service.

By militarising his 'stop-the-boats' mantra Abbott has, either through ignorance or wilful opportunism, attacked the fundamental ethos of the profession of arms.

The Australian constitution allows governments to seek approval from the Governor-General to call out the ADF to assist with 'law enforcement'. The fact that this provision has been invoked only three times indicates its sensitivity. Whose 'law enforcement'? When does the right to equality of 'law enforcement' cross a line and become socially biased and unjust? At what point is 'law enforcement' politicised? Are members of the Defence Force properly prepared practically, intellectually, and emotionally, to act against the citizens they are supposed to protect?

It must be clearly understood: Members of the ADF are not police, or immigration officers, or emergency workers, or any other kind of state official associated with civil law enforcement or good governance.

The sole justification for the existence of a defence force is to apply organised violence in the interests of the state - to protect its citizens from foreign military aggression. Australia's service personnel are educated and trained for that profoundly ethically challenging responsibility within a codified set of laws, to which every soldier, sailor, and airman is subject. Transgress those laws and they can be tried as war criminals.

Yet perhaps even more important than regulations such as the Geneva Conventions and the Law of Armed Conflict is the two-way trust - a compact if you will - that must exist between a defence force and the society it serves if the relationship is to be legitimate.

Best described in Samuel Huntington's classic study The Soldier and the State, that compact rests essentially on a moral base, and may be defined as much by unwritten norms as by any binding legal document. (Ironically, it was also Huntington who in 1993 coined the term 'The Clash of Civilisations' to foreshadow conflict between the West and Islam. Huntington's model did not, however, envisage the forced resettlement by wealthy, mostly white Australia of desperate, mostly Muslim boat-people, to poor, mostly black PNG, a clash of cultures of potentially alarming proportions.)

And it is those unwritten norms that expose the recklessness - indeed, the ignorance - of Tony Abbott's plan.

Helping out after floods or bushfires is one thing. When the ADF assists the community after natural disasters it is being a good citizen. But when it is ordered to conduct a morally dubious - some would say corrupt - operation that would inevitably involve human rights abuses, that is something else altogether.

To repeat: The ADF is not just any organisation. It has a unique role, a unique ethos, and a unique relationship with the society it serves.

War is intrinsically depraved. Regardless of what an enemy might or might not do, if we are not to fall into the abyss ourselves, our conduct must be guided by the highest ethical standards.

Australians can be proud of the ADF: of its professionalism; and of its conduct in war. For decades it has embraced a moral standard the equal of, if not better than, any other defence force in the world.

We should never allow that standard and the compact it enables between the military and society to be undermined; and we should never allow the ADF to be used as an election gimmick by an opportunistic politician.

Tony Abbott's plan to militarise Australia's refugee policy is more than crass, it is an attack on the ethos that gives legitimacy to the profession of arms.

Dr Alan Stephens is a visiting fellow at UNSW at Canberra and a member of the Williams Foundation. View his full profile here.

Commenterson Drum articles might have noticed that over the past several weeks we have had numerous "service unavailable" errors. We are working with our technology department to resolve this and apologise for the inconvenience.